Most shopping carts on the cart market and on supermarket floors today are ill-equipped for transporting the long heavy loads, such as wooden boards or narrow furniture boxes. In recent years, with the rapid spread of warehouses and home improvement stores such as Home Depot, Home Expo, Ikea, etc., that sell construction supplies and boxed disassembled furniture, the problem of inefficient carts has become more acute than ever.
Most of such home improvement stores offer their customers regular carts with a large basket and virtually no additional storage. When customers pick up long heavy objects from the shelves, they have to improvise by placing them on carts not intended for the accommodation of such items. Some customers place long flat objects on the top of the basket, resting them on the front rim of the cart and the handle. But often the front rims of the basket are of varying height. This difference in height causes the long heavy objects to slide down when the cart is moving or when the customer or a by-passer accidentally pushes the protruding item. Since there are no rims on the sides of most carts, the object can slide off the top of the cart in any direction. This is extremely dangerous and can cause not just the breakage of the product and damage to the store, but also serious injury to customers. It is then hard to accommodate the placement of small children who came shopping with their parents since if they stand next to a cart loaded in such a manner, a box or a wooden log falling off the top of the basket can easily cause severe injury.
Some carts have a section under the cart, on top of the wheeled base, specifically devoted to the placement of heavy items (such as the bags of rice, or boxes of bottled water). However, the presence of such under-the-cart compartments necessarily requires a compromise in design. If the under-the-cart compartment is made larger, the size of the main basket necessarily has to decrease. Therefore, the under-the-cart compartment is usually of limited height and length. Because of the limited size of such compartments, many long and wide boxes do not fit into this very limited under-cart space. Even if they do fit, a significant length of the object protrudes from the back and the front of the under-cart space. The object protruding from the back of the cart extends to the area where normally the legs of the customer pushing the cart would be. This protrusion not only makes pushing the cart awkward for the customer, but may also result in tripping and injuries of the same.
Some stores allow customers to use special platforms on wheels for large loads. Often such platforms have no handles and are uncomfortable to move and keep an object steadily balanced on. Furthermore, even if the consumer has access to such platform carts and even if such carts are comfortable and usable by regular consumers, there is still a significant problem. If a customer intends to buy anything other than the long bulky object, he must use a regular cart in addition to the special platform cart. Pushing two carts on a shopping trip, especially with one of the carts being of a handle-less platform variety is a joyless experience for the customer pushing the carts, as well as a dangerous one for other customers who happen to be on the multi-cart-pusher's way. Merchandise accidentally shoved off the shelves and jammed aisles only makes the experience of pushing two carts at once that much worse. So, instead of juggling the carts, most consumers prefer to use just one of the carts at a time. Some would then return with another cart to pick up the items of the shape not fitting into the first cart. Because of the inconvenience associated with leaving one cart unattended and retracing the trip around the store to pick the remaining items, many customers will not return with the second cart and will not buy the merchandise they planned to buy or would have intuitively put into the cart. This leads to decreased sales. Over the course of time, inconveniences to customers resulting from inefficient shopping carts can easily amount to millions of dollars in losses.
Some solutions in the prior art suggest creating a level upper surface of the basket for placing long items on top of such leveled basket. But the use of such adapters does not solve most of the problems described above. In particular, the object would still be prone to falling off the height of the cart, creating a hazard for children. Placing long items on top of the leveled basket would still cause a significant part of the item to extend rearward, where the pusher of the cart is located. The extending object would prevent or seriously interfere with customer approach to the rear of the cart and the use of the handle, thus creating inconvenience and awkwardness of use. Furthermore, the rear cart handle is used as a break on some models of carts. Placement of heavy objects over such break-handle would stall the cart in place.
Placement of most large items over the top of the cart will also cover the basket and interfere with customer placing smaller-shaped items into the cart. This would create the whole range of inconveniences to the customer and loss of sales to the stores, as described above.
Another solution in adopting a shopping cart for carrying long items is described in McGuire (US 2003/0052464A1), which is an elongated flexible holder attached to the exterior of the shopping cart's basket. However, the holder, being constructed of flexible material is prone to wear in everyday supermarket use, particularly at points of attachment to the cart. Heavy items may cause the holder to open. Furthermore, the width and girth of the items that can fit into the holder are limited and have to be predetermined at the time of construction. Such solution is suitable only for slender items, but not for wide, long, heavy boxes.
More complex solutions exist that attempt to address the problems of long items extending over the handle of the cart or into the leg-space of the pusher by placing the long heavy loads on flat platforms, open in the front and the rear, or extending along the side of the cart. Most of such solutions create additional space on the side of the cart at a cost of decreasing the size of the cart's basket.
Furthermore, the existing solutions for placing large heavy loads along the side of the basket are difficult or impossible to incorporate into existing shopping carts. A store, wishing to avoid the problems associated with carrying long heavy loads on regular carts has to get rid of its existing, often large and very expensive fleet of shopping carts and replace it with a fleet of redesigned, much more expensive shopping carts. Such a solution may be too costly to be practical for most stores.
Another problem is that side accessories to carry long bulky items may extend too far outward, thereby causing traffic problems in the store. The solution of making the side accessories adjustable renders the design much more complex and expensive.
In general, the complex designs of the prior art also render adapting the fleet of shopping carts too costly. But the purchase price and constant maintenance costs, that complex designs of prior art require, may not be the end of store's expenses if it elects to replace the regular carts with redesigned carts that have platforms at the side. If down the road, the store decides to stop or reduce the sale of long bulky items, the store would be left with a large inventory of carts having smaller baskets and having platforms extending from the sides. If the owner of the store decides to sell the premises with equipment (including carts) to another store, as often happens, the redesigned carts may become a burden. Unless the purchasing chain sells many long heavy objects, the specialized carts may be of little or no value to it, thereby reducing the value of the premises. Moreover, altering the cart to delete the portions of the cart specifically adapted for long bulky items, if possible at all, would require much time and effort.
Therefore, what is needed is a solution for a cart that can accommodate both the long bulky items, as well as the small products, best fitting into a regular shopping cart. The accommodation of long items must be such that the object, once placed into the cart, does not protrude into the leg-space of the cart pusher and does not interfere with the use of the cart handle. The solution must be durable and maintenance-free. Most importantly, the solution must be simple, inexpensive to produce, and simple for stores to adopt for use in their existing carts, without negatively affecting the resale value of the cart.
The present invention achieves all of these objectives, while also providing numerous additional benefits.